NYC98LA190 · Cessna 172
Cessna 172 · Accident: hard landing
From Waterbury Oxford Airport (OXC) to Minute Man Air Field (6B6)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC98LA190
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Accident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- General aviation
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Cessna 172
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N1729V
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Waterbury Oxford Airport (OXC), Oxford, CTTo Minute Man Air Field (6B6)
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 91: General Aviation
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- Landing · landing roll
- First occurrenceThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Hard landing
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Recovery from bounced landing, improper
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Stow, MA, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
At his destination airport the pilot was unable to reach anyone by radio or verify the winds visually, so he made left traffic for Runway 3. When the pilot flared the airplane it floated down the runway. The pilot then bounced the airplane three times. After the third bounce he drove the airplane hard onto the runway and applied maximum braking. Unable to stop, the airplane then departed the departure end of the runway, shearing the nose gear and ultimately nosing over. The pilot had over 25,000 hours of flight experience, but only 25 hours in small general aviation airplanes. He also did not have a single engine land rating nor was he operating the airplane as a student pilot. When the pilot approached the flying club to become a member no one from the club asked him if he had an airplane single engine land rating because of his airline pilot back ground. It was just assumed. The club did require the pilot to take a proficiency ride before he was allowed to rent from them. The pilot estimated the winds to be from 210 degrees magnetic at 10 knots at the time of the accident.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper recovery from a bounced landing. Contributing factors were the pilot's lack of a single engine experience/certification. Also a factor was the flying club's inadequate oversight of pilot qualifications.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC98LA190
- Event ID
- 20001211X11156
- Case number
- NYC98LA190
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: a25641c1a5c9927ca2644b39b059e36887c0de6cbea988a0c0c30a4be73787e1; retrieved 2026-09-22T16:46:13.530Z.